


pitch black, pale blue

by barebones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s14e10 Nihilism, M/M, Minor Dissociation, dean deserves soft touches and cas is happy to oblige, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 08:15:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17504951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barebones/pseuds/barebones
Summary: “Tonight,” Cas begins but then falters, looking down at those sensible shoes of his. “I—”Dean waits, witnessing as Cas’s gaze lifts and then flits like an indecisive songbird around the room, landing anywhere but on Dean.Cas sighs, fingers flexing at his sides. “I don’t think it wise for you to spend it alone.”Dean blinks his bafflement. “Ain’t that the point?”(14.10 “Nihilism” coda)





	pitch black, pale blue

**Author's Note:**

> _Surprise, surprise,_ the title comes from lyrics, this time “Neptune” by Sleeping at Last, to which I'd listened on repeat while writing this.
> 
> As always, thanks for indulging me. ♥

Kick-starting his heart into overdrive, Billie’s exit is more of a bullet kissing the barrel goodbye than the soundless thing it really is.

In her absence he ingests the notebook’s printed words but can’t _digest_ them, beseeching clarity from them for so long that his vision whites out, bleaching the page, and all the while there may as well be cicadas in his cerebral cortex, a cacophony of insect song and Michael’s fists banging and _banging._

What the fuck _is_ he supposed to do with this?

Like a teenager hiding skin mags from his mom, Dean tucks the freakin’ Death Note that’s designated his name on its skinny spine in between his memory foam and box springs, lays over those the thin cottons of his bedcovers, and then retracts a step to ascertain a cover-up well done—for now.

Michael roars. Dean respires.

“It’s just you, man.” A fiction willed to be fact. “It’s just… me.”

In-between peripheral heartbeats and the clanking of unyielding metal in the foreground, Dean isn’t sure how he hears it—Billie had been right—but someone is knocking on his _actual_ door, the one outside of himself.

“Yeah?” he answers from somewhere on his bed, startling at the volume of his own voice. At what point did he sit down?

Cas—his shoulders squared, the same bags weighing down the same blue eyes that zero in on Dean as soon as they catch him in their line of vision—is the one who enters, closing behind him the door that feels less solid than the one being beaten to hell inside Dean’s head.

A tentative thread tugs on the roughness of Cas’s voice as he ventures, “Dean?” followed by, “Are you…” His mouth opens then closes, pursing and then not. “I thought I heard… talking.”

From where they’ve been clenched atop his knees as balls of anxious energy, Dean’s fists unclench, and then like the professional bullshitter that he is, he recites his truth: “It’s just me, Cas.”

Cas’s shoulders slouch an infinitesimal amount, an act of relief so barely-there that it has Dean staring with itchy eyes too long in the wake of it. One blink and it would’ve gone amiss.

“And how are _you_ faring, Dean?” The emphasis doesn’t go unnoticed—or unappreciated.

Although Dean stands on the precipice of this new arrangement, he isn’t dangling from it. Michael may as well be the shitty roommate with a penchant for smashing Dean’s things, because that’s what he has to be in order for this to work. Just the guy Dean’s gotta live with until the lease expires.

Whenever it is that may be.

“Tired, but… it’s good,” he says in an easy confidence that tricks even himself. “ _I’m_ good.”

One side of Cas’s mouth lifts, and then he nods, because of course he does.

They openly stare at each other, then: Dean hunched over his knees, Cas hovering by the door like there’s a second conversation here meant to be had.

After a long moment, Dean prompts, “Well… I think I’m gonna—”

“Tonight,” Cas begins but then falters, looking down at those sensible shoes of his. “I—”

Dean waits, witnessing as Cas’s gaze lifts and then flits like an indecisive songbird around the room, landing anywhere but on Dean.

Cas sighs, fingers flexing at his sides. “I don’t think it wise for you to spend it alone.”

Dean blinks his bafflement. “Ain’t that the point?”

As Cas shifts on the spot, Dean picks up on it: the slither of chain against cuff, hidden in what has to be the pocket of Cas’s trench coat.

“We can’t predict how your mind will cope during sleep.”

“So, what—you gonna arrest me, officer?” A scoff bursts out of Dean. “Not sure if I'm in the kinky mood.”

The jest falls flat, the notebook too heavy yet _on_ his mind, the thuds of intangible objects being thrown _in_ it too explosive, but Dean doesn’t take offense to Cas’s preemptive line of thinking; in fact, he endorses it.

Wait, the extra precaution, not the—oh, fuck it.

Like he said, he’s tired. Of more than one thing, he is bone-deep _exhausted,_ so while he knows the choreography well to their song and dance—don’t get too close, don’t touch for too long, because closeness leads to candor and touching leads to more intimacy—he can’t find it in himself to keep it going. That looming exception—the alternate ending, not the theatrical cut that entails Michael wearing him like an angel condom to the ends of this world—prevents it.

Defeated, Dean offers up his wrists. “Go for it,” he says, and he waits.

Instead of the souped-up Enochian cuffs locking in place, however, Dean hears Cas say, “What I meant was… I could watch over you,” and is instantly transported back some ten years in time to when the stench of antiseptic and the cadence of his own heart monitor suffused his senses, to when he himself said a tearful _find someone else, Cas, I can’t do this, I’m not strong enough—_

The deadbolt rattles: fruitless, secure.

Dean mumbles, “Oh,” and then, past the hard lump that’s formed in his throat, “Wouldn’t, um—wouldn’t be the first time.”

Cas’s lips give a fond quirk. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.”

For all that Cas has seen of him—from his stripped soul down to his very last cell—he grants Dean the dignity of a man who hasn’t died a hundred deaths, anyway, by turning around while Dean sheds his jeans and renders those and the Henley he’s traded in for a threadbare T-shirt into a pile of tomorrow’s problem on the bedside floor.

Dean climbs fully into bed. Cas sits on the chair somewhere to Dean’s left. They wait.

An eternity crawls by before Dean is groaning, deep and exasperated, and hoisting himself up from where he’s been lying flat on his back. “Okay, I can’t take this.”

“Take what?”

“You, sittin’ over there like Precious Moments. Get over here.”

Cas’s face is one-part affronted and two-parts bemused.

“You heard me.”

The sigh unleashed by Cas is so wholly _bitchy_ and put-out that Dean can’t help his triumphant grin as he wiggles over to accommodate _Cas_ of all people. Into the subsequent dip of the memory foam, Dean’s tension rolls away, and it’s more than what he could’ve imagined, being this at peace with Cas, who breathes steady, superfluous breaths beside him, but Dean is.

They spend the next minute abreast—their hips and their legs in perfect alignment and the headboard against their backs—with Dean beneath the blankets and Cas atop them. Somewhere during those meandering moments, though, Dean remembers that he’s supposed to be trying to sleep, so he shimmies his butt downward until his head is sinking back into the pillow.

Cas follows suit, turning onto his right side to afford Dean more room. His tie is a cool glide down the tender skin, its trademark barrier of flannel gone, of Dean’s upper arm.

This was a mistake.

“Dean.”

It’s a miracle Dean doesn’t choke on his own spit as he responds with, “Hm?”

His cheek pillowed by his two big hands, palm-to-palm, Cas faces Dean, who catalogues the butterscotch lamplight that halos Cas’s tousled crown, that delineates the cut of his jaw and the delicate shell of his ear. For such an earthly illumination, it has Cas appearing heavenly.

Cas asks, “Is there anything I can do for you?” with a sincerity that presses keenly into Dean’s sternum, halting his breath.

There are a million things he wants Cas to do for him and a million reasons more that insist Cas shouldn’t.

Dean’s next exhale is the cork popping out of the champagne bottle. “It’s good,” he tries to say past the effervescence clogging his larynx. “I’m good.”

_It’s all me. It’s just me._

“That isn’t what I’d asked.” Cas’s words are satin-soft and patient. Dean could wrap himself up in them.

Unbidden moisture springs to Dean’s eyes that have taken to staring up at the concrete ceiling. He doesn’t need to see Cas’s to know that the clear blue of them may as well be pools of unperturbed water, inviting Dean to swim in them. Over the years, he’s tossed more wishes into those waters than he can count.

“I just—”

Bang, bang, _bang._

“—I just wish I could hear somethin’ else for five minutes.”

Even Cas’s sigh is sympathetic. “Does talking help?”

“No.” Yes.

Because he’s Cas, and Cas knows Dean well, he goes on to say, “You’re more than strong,” and it echoes as uncanny déjà vu in the chambers of Dean’s mind. “You… deserve contentment. The real kind, found out here.”

Dean’s mouth tries—keyword: _tries_ —to work. When it doesn’t, he settles on clamping it shut, on squeezing his eyes shut so hard that in the darkness behind his eyelids there erupt fireworks.

Then there is Cas’s hand, cradling the far side of Dean’s face, and the drawn shutters of Dean’s eyes reel open so fast and so dizzying, Dean at first doesn’t register that the turning of his own head to face Cas isn’t his conscious choice: it’s an act of Cas’s gentle will.

A wistful sort of worry has knitted Cas’s brows, has shaped the plushness of his lips into a small frown. His thumb reads the Braille that make up Dean’s freckles, a tingly trail up and along the crest of Dean’s cheekbone and the side of his nose.

Now, Dean could celebrate _this_ sort of drowning, the kind for which Cas’s reverent touch is responsible. For this, he would go willingly.

“Cas, I,” he begins but doesn’t know how to finish, his chest unceasing in its rapid rise and fall.

“You will persevere,” Cas assuages, and Dean can’t help but to watch Cas’s mouth make each syllable of it. “Time and time again, I’ve had faith in you to do just that.”

Dean can’t stop blinking; he smiles crookedly to detract from it, and he tries very hard not to think of the counterargument, hidden beneath his mattress, to Cas's words. “Pretty sure there’s a ’fool me once, shame on you’ somewhere in there.”

Cas’s own smile is tremendously tender as he counters, “I prefer to think of each time as a lesson in humanity.”

From there their foreheads meet, their breaths entangle, and Cas’s thumb continues its ministrations, sweeping over Dean’s cheek, his jaw and temple. At one point Cas even drags his blunt fingernails through the fine hairs on Dean’s head, and the more Dean clings onto this and every other new sensation courtesy of Cas, the more Michael becomes a distant din beneath them.

There’s just one more thing Dean needs to clear up before slumber claims him. Already his eyes fight to stay open, barely cracked.

“Uh, Cas?”

“Yes?”

“Not that it will, but if somethin’… if somethin’ _were_ to happen while I’m, uh, dead to the world… you really think you’ll be fast enough to slap those cuffs on me?”

Cas’s thumb has reached the swell of Dean’s bottom lip, lighting the match of nerve-endings there. Again he says, “Yes.”

Even halfway asleep, Dean recognizes how self-assured that sounds and snorts—not in disbelief, but in how classically _Cas_ it is. “How’s that?”

Cas hums. “I can read the warning signs.”

Dean tries not to slur but fails. “Warnin' signs?”

In its slow grazing, Cas’s thumb pauses for a millisecond before resuming. “Your color, your… _essence,_ it… changes when Michael takes control. Think of it like a dirty paintbrush being dipped in clean water—yours and Michael’s colors mix much in the same way, and I can see the start of it.”

Dean’s eyes have long since closed, his brow crinkling now in deep confusion. He can’t articulate anything other than some grunt in half-baked acquiescence.

A smile in his voice, Cas simply instructs, “Sleep, Dean.”

And so Dean does.


End file.
